CHAPTER ELEVEN
ASHLEY POV
I do not remember falling asleep.
One minute I am sitting on the edge of my bed, the morning's file names and Damien's voice still skittering against my ribs like loose teeth, and the next moment the world dissolves and the dream swallows me whole.
This time the dream does not soften me. It slams like a door and I am shoved through, breathless, into a corridor of light so bright it stings my eyes. The air hums low, like an enormous violin string being plucked somewhere beneath the floor. Light pools and flows beneath my feet. The ceiling is a moving score of gold that ripples in slow waves.
"Little star…" a voice says, warm and impossible.
The sound is not whispering now — it fills the corridor and presses against my chest like a hand. It is familiar in a way I don't have words for, yet it feels like the beginning of everything I've been missing.
"Who are you?" I ask, my voice surprised at how steady it sounds, as if something inside me has learned to speak in public.
There is a laugh, soft and amused. "You would not remember my name yet," it says. Then, gentler, "You would not yet need my name. You need your blood."
The corridor flares and a silhouette steps through the brightness — not a shadow at all, but a form that hurts to look at because it is too clean, too right. He is tall, wrapped in blades of light that move like feathers, and when he spreads his wings the corridor fills and the sound changes. For a second I cannot breathe.
"Not here to frighten you," he says. His voice is thunder smoothed by the hush of wind through wheat. He does not look at me like a man looks at a woman. He looks at me like someone recognizes a map he has been waiting to read.
"Wake?" I ask. "Wake what?"
"Your blood," he replies simply. "Your memory. Your true shape." He takes one step closer and the stone under his boots glows.
I laugh because it's the only thing that feels safe to do. "This is a dream," I say. "It's ridiculous. I have a real job. I have bills. I drink boxed wine."
He bends and lays a finger against my forehead. The touch is cool and it hums like a tuning fork.
Suddenly I am somewhere else — not moved, but carried into a memory I do not own. The air is sharp with iron and salt. The sky above is a wound of violet and silver. I feel weightless and ancient, as if I have been folded into the middle of a time before time.
An army of light moves like a living constellation. Their armor is white fire; their wings are knives of silver. Opposite them, shadow-forms—familiar shapes that smell bitter and old—coil and strike. The clash makes a noise like the ocean breaking across a cliff.
I watch a figure cut through the maelstrom — not clumsy, not reckless, but precise. He fights as if composing a sentence: exact, elegant, fatal. He turns and his eyes catch mine across the battlefield. Silver. Not cold — precise. They land somewhere in my chest and I understand, absurdly, that I know the way they feel.
He kneels beside a woman on a small knoll of scorched grass. Her face is like a photograph of someone I have never met but who lives in the corners of my childhood memory. She is pregnant. The way he touches her cheek fractures the air, and he whispers something I cannot hear, but the expression in his eyes breaks me. Tenderness in a place where tenderness has no right to be.
"Protect her," a voice says in the vision, and a second later the warrior answers: "If she is the light, then bind her to the world. Let no darkness swallow her."
I pull at the edges of the vision, wanting it to stop, because the ache of belonging is not supposed to be available to me. Not now. Not this way. But the dream barrels forward. I see a small figure — a baby wrapped in cloth that shines like new coin. I feel a thunder in my ribs like someone is striking a drum.
Then the scene shifts. The warrior stands alone on a ridge, watching the horizon scorch with unsaid things. He turns to me — his mouth moves, forming words I haven't been allowed to learn yet. I hear them like bells through fog.
"You will either save the world," he says, "or you will destroy it."
Something hot rises in my throat like bile. "No," I whisper aloud, caught in the dream's gravity, trying to push away the idea that the seed of some war might be my heart.
The corridor brightens, and when the warrior takes a step forward in dreamspace his hand brushes my chest. Light surges through me like a current — not electrical, not merely sensation, but knowledge. Names translate. Shapes make sense. My hands go to my heart without thinking.
"You are the daughter of a Guardian," the figure says — the word full of meaning like a key — "one of the Sons of Light. Your blood remembers."
The corridor shifts to a narrower tunnel of white, and the taste in my mouth is salt and thunder. I want to run. I want to wake and forget and return to the slow grief of office life, but a voice otherwise — the soft little voice from the first lullaby of my dreams — whispers, Little star, wake fully.
The warrior's face is unreadable. "The world will try to claim what you are," he says. "Some will want to use you; some will want to break you. There is one… who will try to feed on your light and make darkness from your name."
I have seen him. I have felt him. His name scrapes my mind like a chain — Damien. My throat closes.
"It is not for you to unravel everything tonight," the warrior says, then softer, "You were always meant to be larger than your life. You were sheltered for a reason."
"Why now?" I demand. "Why did this happen tonight?"
The warrior's wings flare, throwing gold like leaves. "Because a shadow screamed near you. He fed. The Allo left its mark. Your blood answered." For the first time there is a shadow of grief in his voice. "Not all marks are made by malice alone — some are accidents of hunger. But the wound mattered. Your light moved to heal itself."
I feel the truth of that like a bruise. Emma's name—someone I half-remember meeting in a corridor—surges like a ghost of pain: the empty place she must now carry. The memory of a man with a glass of wine and a hunger like a machine. The dream's edge tastes of bitter copper.
"You will not be helpless," the warrior says. "Your light is not a child's candle. It is a furnace by heritage. It can scorch. It can protect. It can be a blade. But you must learn to shape it."
"Shape it how?" My voice trembles. My hands are shaking in the dream like they do in the boardroom. I am not the woman who uses a word like furnace to describe herself. I bill clients and proofread releases and rehearse smiles. Not this.
"You will have to make choices," the warrior says. "Your light will pull like gravity. He will pull like gravity too. The more you resist what he wants, the tighter the thread becomes. Fate is cunning. Rejection binds in ways consent never does."
I close my eyes. Rage and fear twist together into a hard knot. "I will not be bound to a monster."
"You may not be bound to him by choice, but the world is complicated. Your light will answer and that is not entirely within your control." He steps closer and a wind that smells like orange peel and old rain rises. "Do not bow. Do not run. When he faces you, stand."
"Stand?" I laugh, bitter and broken. "He is the type who ruins people."
"A darkness that feeds cannot ignore light," the warrior says. "Neither can light ignore hunger. One will change the other. Whether change is mercy or ruin depends on who never gives up."
The corridor intensifies. A symbol appears along the center of the floor — a sigil of concentric rings and braided lines that vibrates. Heat presses through my soles. I kneel, palms to the glowing symbol, and the warmth pours up into me like a tide. It is not just warmth; it is a memory of safe things I never knew: someone holding me as a child, a voice that hummed lullabies I do not remember, a sense of being anchored.
"You must learn," the warrior says, "to reach without giving all, to protect without consuming, to call without attracting the wrong things. He will not be the only one who seeks your light."
My breath comes faster. "Who else?"
He does not answer directly. Shadows curl at the edge of the corridor like smoke; in that smoke I glimpse faces — some human, some not. Some hands hold books; others hold knives. The world has layers, and bloodlines draw maps across it.
"Teach me," I say desperately. The word is smaller than the need.
"You will learn," he promises. "But first — feel."
He presses his palm over mine and the light inside the sigil pulses — a slow, rhythmic beating — and for the first time since the dream began I am not afraid. Power rises in me with the inevitability of tide: not loud, not triumphant, but sure.
The warrior places his face inches from mine. He says quietly, "Next time he looks at you as if you are a problem or a puzzle, do not step back. Step forward. Name your light. Let it answer. Not in anger. In clarity."
"Name my light?" My voice is only a thread.
"Choose a call," he says. "A single thing that reminds you who you are. When you falter, call it to yourself."
I think of small things that carry meaning — my mother's laugh, the smell of bread baking in my childhood apartment, the star I used to draw as a child — and one of them resonates like a bell. "Little star," I whisper, and my palms glow again. The sound of the words is softer than I expected and the corridor accepts them like a prayer.
"Little star," the warrior repeats, approving, and a smile that is something ancient and kind graces his mouth. "Good. Keep it."
The corridor begins to collapse like a house of cards. Light peels away and the battlefield fades. I feel hollowing and fullness in the same breath: grief for what I don't yet understand, and a fierce hope that there is something I can do.
"Remember," he says as the last sliver of the dream slips. "Do not cower. Stand. Be terrible in your insistence on being whole."
I wake with a scream caught in my throat, the sheets tangled around my legs. The fan above is a slow blur. The ceiling lamp hums. My heart is a drum in my throat. For a long moment I cannot move; my chest is a furnace. My palm is wet with sweat.
I sit up and press my hands to my sternum. There is warmth there — not the phantom buzzy warmth of anxiety, but a real heat that sits like a small coal